The Map of the Sky

by Félix J Palma

  Wells did not deign to laugh at his joke. Leaning back in his chair he waited for Serviss’s shrill laughter to die out, adopting an expression more befitting a pallbearer than someone about to have lunch with an acquaintance.

  “Well, well, I didn’t mean to upset you, George,” Serviss went on, pretending to be put out by Wells’s coldness. “I just can’t help showing my admiration.”

  “As far as I am concerned you can save your praise,” Wells retorted, resolving to take charge of the conversation. “The fact that you have written a sequel to my latest novel speaks for itself, Mr. Ser—”

  “Call me Garrett, George, please.”

  “Very well, Garrett,” Wells agreed, annoyed at Serviss for forcing this familiarity on him, which was inappropriate to an ear bashing, and for the jolly air he insisted on imposing on the conversation. “As I was saying—”

  “But there’s no such thing as too much praise, right, George?” the American interrupted once more. “Especially when it’s deserved, as in your case. I confess my admiration for you isn’t an overnight thing. It began . . . when? A couple of years back, at least, after I read The Time Machine, an even more extraordinary work for being your first.”

  Wells nodded indifferently, taking advantage of Serviss having stopped his salesman’s patter to take a swig of beer. He had to find a way of breaking off Serviss’s incessant prattle to tell him what he thought of his novel. The longer he waited, the more awkward it would be for them both. But the American was unrelenting.

  “And what a happy coincidence that just after you published your novel, someone found a way of traveling in time,” he said, bobbing his head in an exaggerated fashion, as though he were still recovering from the shock. “I guess you took a trip to the year two thousand to witness the epic battle for the future of mankind, right?”

  “No, I never traveled in time.”

  “You didn’t? Why ever not?” the other man asked, astonished.

  Wells paused for a few moments, remembering how during the days when Murray’s Time Travel was still open for business he had been forced to maintain an impassive silence whenever someone alluded to it with an ecstatic smile on his or her face. On such occasions, which occurred with exasperating regularity, Wells invariably responded with a couple of sarcastic remarks aimed at puncturing the enthusiasm of the person addressing him, as though he himself were above reality, or one step ahead of it, but in any event unaffected by its vagaries. And wasn’t that what the hoi polloi expected of writers, to whom by default they attributed loftier interests than their own more pedestrian ones? On other occasions, when he wasn’t in the mood for sarcasm, Wells pretended to take exception to the exorbitant price of the tickets. This was the approach he decided to adopt with Serviss, who, being a writer himself, was likely to be unconvinced by the former.

  “Because the future belongs to all of us, and I don’t believe the price of a ticket should deprive anyone of seeing it.”

  Serviss looked at him, puzzled, then rubbed his face with a sudden gesture, as though a cobweb had stuck to it.

  “Ah, of course! Forgive my tactlessness, George: the tickets were too dear for poor writers like us,” he said, misinterpreting Wells’s remark. “To be honest, I couldn’t afford one myself. Although I did begin saving up in order to be able to climb aboard the famous Cronotilus, you know? I wanted to see the battle for the future. I really did. I even planned mischievously to break away from the group once I was there, in order to shake Captain Shackleton’s hand and thank him for making sure all our prayers didn’t fall on deaf ears. For could we have carried on inventing things and producing works of art had we known that in the year two thousand no human being would be left alive on Earth to enjoy them—that because of those evil automatons, Man and everything he had ever achieved would have been wiped away as though it had never even existed?” With this, Serviss appeared to sink back into his chair, before continuing in a melancholy voice. “As it is, you and I will no longer be able to travel to the future, George. A great shame, as I expect you could more than afford it now. I guess it must have pained you as much as it did me to find out that the time travel company closed down after Mr. Murray passed away.”

  “Yes, a great pity,” Wells replied sardonically.

  “The newspapers said he’d been eaten alive by one of those dragons in the fourth dimension,” Serviss recalled mournfully, “in front of several of his employees, who could do nothing to save him. It must have been awful.”

  Yes, thought Wells, Murray certainly engineered a dramatic death for himself.

  “And how will we get into the fourth dimension now?” asked Serviss. “Do you think it will remain sealed off forever?”

  “I’ve no idea,” Wells replied coldly.

  “Well, perhaps we’ll witness other things. Perhaps our fate will be to travel in space, not time,” Serviss consoled himself, finishing up his pint. “The sky is a vast and infinite place. And full of surprises, isn’t that right, George?”

  “Possibly,” Wells agreed, stirring uneasily in his seat, as though his buttocks were scalding. “But I’d like to talk to you about your novel, Mr. Ser—Garrett.”

  Serviss suddenly sat bolt upright and stared at Wells attentively, like a beagle scenting a trail. Relieved to have finally caught the man’s attention, Wells downed the last of his beer in order to give himself the courage and composure he needed to broach the subject. His gesture did not escape Serviss’s notice.

  “Waiter, another round, please, the world’s greatest living writer is thirsty!” he cried, waving his arms about frantically to catch the waiter’s eye. Then he looked back at Wells full of anticipation. “So, my friend, did you like my novel?”

  Wells remained silent while the waiter placed two more tankards on the table and cast him an admiring glance. Realizing he was under scrutiny, Wells automatically sat up straight, surreptitiously puffing out his chest, as though his greatness as a writer must be evinced not only in his books but in his physical appearance.

  “Well . . . ,” Wells began, once the waiter had moved away, noticing that Serviss was watching him anxiously.

  “Well, what?” the other man inquired with childlike anticipation.

  “Some of it is . . .” The two men’s eyes met for a moment and a cavernous silence grew between them before Wells continued: “ . . . excellent.”

  “Some. Of. It. Is. Excellent,” Serviss repeated, savoring each word dreamily. “Such as what, for instance?”

  Wells took another swig of his beer to buy himself time. What the devil was there of any excellence in Serviss’s novel?

  “The space suits. Or the oxygen pills,” he replied, because the only salvageable thing in the novel was its paraphernalia. “They are very . . . ingenious.”

  “Why, thank you, George! I knew you’d love my story,” Serviss trilled, almost in raptures. “Could it have been otherwise? I doubt it. You and I are twin souls, in a literary sense, of course. Although who knows in what other ways . . . Oh, my friend, don’t you see we’re creating something hitherto unknown? Our stories will soon move away from the common path of literature and forge a new one of their own. You and I are making History, George. We’ll be considered the fathers of a new genre. Together with Jules Verne, of course. We mustn’t forget the Frenchman. The three of us, the three of us together are changing the course of literature.”

  “I have no interest in creating a new genre,” Wells interrupted, increasingly annoyed at himself for his failure to steer the conversation in the direction he wanted.

  “Well, I don’t think we have much choice in the matter,” objected Serviss with finality. “Let’s talk about your latest novel, George. Those Martian ships like stingrays floating over London are so startling . . . But first I’d like to ask you something: aren’t you afraid that if, after you wrote The Time Machine, someone discovered a way of traveling in time, then the next thing will be a Martian invasion?”

  Wells stared at him blankly, tryi
ng to decide whether he was in earnest or whether this was another of his crazy ideas, but Serviss waited solemnly for him to reply.

  “The fact that I wrote about a Martian invasion doesn’t mean I believe in life on Mars, Garrett,” he explained frostily. “It’s a simple allegory. I chose Mars more as a metaphor, to lay emphasis on the god of war, and because of its redness.”

  “Ah, the iron oxide in the volcanic basalt rock covering its surface like damned lichen and giving it that disconcerting appearance,” Serviss replied, airing his knowledge.

  “My sole intention was to criticize Europe’s colonization of Africa,” Wells resumed, ignoring him, “and to warn of the perils of developing new weapons at a time when Germany is engaging in a process of militarization, which seems to me unsettling to say the least. But above all, Garrett, I wanted to warn mankind that everything around us, our science, our religion, could prove ineffectual in the face of something as unimaginable as an attack by a superior race.”

  He failed to add that, while he had been at it, he had allowed himself to settle a few old scores: the first scenes of Martian destruction, such as Horsell and Addlestone, were places where he had spent his rather unhappy childhood.

  “And boy, did you succeed, George!” Serviss acknowledged with gloomy admiration. “That’s why I had to write my sequel: I had to give back the hope you took away from Man.”

  And that hope was Edison? Wells thought, grudgingly amused, as he felt a vague sense of well-being course through him. He couldn’t tell whether this was a result of the tankards starting to clutter the tabletop, or the little man’s delightful habit of agreeing with every word he said. Whatever the reason, he couldn’t deny he was beginning to feel at ease. He wasn’t sure how they had succeeded in discussing the subject of Serviss’s novel without incident, but they had. Although how could it have been otherwise, he asked himself, if the only word he had managed to mutter was “excellent”? Consequently, Serviss now believed this was Wells’s true opinion of his novel, and he hadn’t the energy to take issue with his own words. He didn’t want to do that to Serviss. The man might deserve some punishment for having the nerve to write a sequel to his novel, but Wells didn’t think he would derive any pleasure from exacting it. Then he recalled how the novel’s outlandish humor, which, although clearly unintentional, had brought a fleeting smile to his lips several times while he was reading it. And although on various occasions he had hurled the thing against the wall, exasperated at such exemplary inelegance and stupidity, he had always picked it up and carried on reading. He found something oddly likable about the way Serviss wrote. It was the same with his absurd letters. Wells invariably ended up throwing them on the fire, yet he couldn’t help reading them first.

  “Didn’t it occur to you at some point to give the story a different ending, one in which we managed to defeat the Martians?” said Serviss, interrupting his reverie.

  “What?” Wells declared. “What hope do we Earthlings have of defeating the Martian technology I described?”

  Serviss shrugged, unable to reply.

  “In any event, I felt it was my duty to offer an alternative, a ray of hope . . . ,” Serviss finally muttered, contemplating with a faint smile the crowd in the pub. “Like any other man here, I’d like to think that if someday we were invaded from the sky, we’d have some hope of survival.”

  “Perhaps we would,” Wells said, softening. “But my mistrust of Man is too great, Garrett. If there was a way of defeating the Martians, I’m sure it would be no thanks to us. Who knows, perhaps help would come from the most unexpected quarter. Besides, why does it worry you so much? Do you really believe our neighbors from Mars are going to invade us?”

  “Of course I do, George,” Serviss replied solemnly. “Although I suppose it’ll happen after the year two thousand. First we have to deal with the automatons.”

  “The automatons? Oh yes, of course . . . the automatons.”

  “But there’s no question in my mind that sooner or later they’ll invade,” Serviss insisted. “Don’t you believe, as Lowell maintains in his book, that the canals on Mars were built by an intelligent life-form?”

  Wells had read Percival Lowell’s book Mars, in which he set out this idea; in fact he had used it to substantiate his own novel, but it was a long way from there to believing in life on Mars.

  “I don’t suppose the purpose of the many millions of planets in the universe is simply to create a pretty backdrop,” replied Wells, who considered discussions about the existence of life on other planets a pointless exercise. “Nor is it unreasonable to imagine that hundreds of them probably enjoy the conditions essential for supporting life. However, if Mars is anything to go by . . .”

  “And they don’t necessarily need oxygen or water,” Serviss observed excitedly. “Here on our planet we have creatures, like anaerobic bacteria, that can live without oxygen. That would already double the number of planets able to support life. There could be more than a hundred thousand civilizations out there that are more advanced than ours, George. And I’m sure generations to come will discover abundant and unexpected life on other planets, although we won’t live to see it, and they’ll come to accept with resignation that they aren’t the only intelligent, let alone the oldest, life-form in the Cosmos.”

  “I agree, Garrett,” Wells conceded, “but I am also convinced that such ‘civilizations’ would have nothing in common with ours. We would be as hard put to understand them as a dog would the workings of a steam engine. For example, they may have no desire to explore space at all, while we gaze endlessly at the stars and wonder if we are alone in the universe, as Galileo himself did.”

  “Yes, although he was careful not to do it too audibly, for fear of upsetting the church,” Serviss quipped.

  A smile fluttered across Wells’s lips, and he discovered that the drink had relaxed his facial muscles. Serviss had extracted a smile from him fair and square, and there it must stay.

  “Of course, what we can’t deny is Man’s eagerness to communicate with supposed creatures from outer space,” Serviss said, after managing to make two fresh pints brimming with beer appear on the table, as if out of nowhere. “Do you remember the attempts by that German mathematician to reflect light from the sun onto other planets with a device he invented called a heliotrope? What was the fellow’s name again? Grove?”

  “Grau. Or Gauss,” Wells ventured.

  “That’s it, Gauss. His name was Karl Gauss.”

  “He also suggested planting an enormous right-angled triangle of pine trees on the Russian steppe, so that observers from other worlds would know there were beings on Earth capable of understanding the Pythagorean theorem,” Wells recalled.

  “Yes, that’s right,” Serviss added. “He claimed no geometrical shape could be interpreted as an unintentional construction.”

  “And what about that astronomer who had the bright idea of digging a circular canal in the Sahara Desert, then filling it with kerosene and lighting it at night to show our location?”

  “Yes, and a perfect target!”

  Wells gave a slight chuckle. Serviss responded by downing the rest of his beer and urged Wells to do the same. Wells obeyed, somewhat abashed.

  “The last I heard they are going to hang reflectors on the Eiffel Tower to shine light from the Sun onto Mars,” he remarked, while Serviss ordered another round.

  “Good heavens, they never give up!” Serviss exclaimed, thrusting another pint toward Wells.

  “You can say that again,” Wells seconded, noticing with alarm that he was beginning to have difficulty speaking without slurring his words. “We seem to think here on Earth that beings in space will be able to see anything we come up with.”

  “As if they spend all their money on telescopes!” Serviss joked.

  Wells couldn’t help letting out a guffaw. Infected by his laughter, Serviss began slapping his hand on the tabletop, causing enough din to elicit a few disapproving looks from the waiter and some of the
other diners. These censorious looks, however, appeared not to intimidate Serviss, who slapped the table even harder, a defiant expression on his face. Wells gazed at him contentedly, like a proud father admiring his son’s antics.

  “Well, well . . . so, you don’t think anyone would go to the trouble of invading a tiny planet like ours, lost in the infinity of the Cosmos, is that it, George?” Serviss said, trying to sum up once he had managed to calm down.

  “I think it unlikely. Bear in mind that things never turn out the way we imagine. It is almost a mathematical law. Accordingly, Earth will never be invaded by Martians like it was in my book, for example.”

  “Won’t it?”

  “Never,” Wells said resolutely. “Look at all the novels currently being churned out about contact with other worlds, Garrett. Apparently, anyone can write one. If future encounters were to take place with beings from outer space identical to the ones we authors have written about, it would be a case of literary premonition, don’t you think?”

  At this, he took a swig of beer, with the nagging impression that what he had just said was no more than harebrained nonsense.

  “Yes,” agreed Serviss, giving no sign that he considered Wells’s disquisition outlandish. “Our naïve rulers will quite possibly end up believing that evil beings from outer space have filled our subconscious minds with these imaginings, by means of ultrasonic rays or hypnosis, perhaps in preparation for a future invasion.”

  “In all likelihood!” Wells burst out laughing, at which Serviss began slapping the table once more, to the despair of the waiter and the nearest customers.